Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- I.1 Contradictory Judgments of the Revolution at Its Inception
- I.2 That the Fundamental and Final Purpose of the Revolution Was Not, as Some Have Thought, to Destroy Religious Authority and Weaken Political Authority
- I.3 How the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution That Proceeded in the Manner of Religious Revolutions, and Why
- I.4 How Almost All of Europe Had Exactly the Same Institutions, and How Those Institutions Were Crumbling Everywhere
- I.5 What Was the Essential Achievement of the French Revolution?
- Book II
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
I.1 - Contradictory Judgments of the Revolution at Its Inception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- I.1 Contradictory Judgments of the Revolution at Its Inception
- I.2 That the Fundamental and Final Purpose of the Revolution Was Not, as Some Have Thought, to Destroy Religious Authority and Weaken Political Authority
- I.3 How the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution That Proceeded in the Manner of Religious Revolutions, and Why
- I.4 How Almost All of Europe Had Exactly the Same Institutions, and How Those Institutions Were Crumbling Everywhere
- I.5 What Was the Essential Achievement of the French Revolution?
- Book II
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Summary
Nothing is more apt to remind philosophers and statesmen of the need for modesty than the history of the French Revolution, for no event was greater or longer in the making or more fully prepared yet so little anticipated.
Not even Frederick the Great, for all his genius, sensed what was coming. He was in contact with it yet failed to see it. Indeed, his actions were in accord with the spirit of the Revolution before the fact. He was its precursor and, in a manner of speaking, its agent. Yet he did not see it looming on the horizon, and when at last it did show its face, the remarkable new features that would set it apart from a host of other revolutions initially went unnoticed.
Outside of France the Revolution aroused universal curiosity. It made people everywhere think that new times were coming and stirred vague hopes of change and reform, but no one yet suspected what it was to become. Princes and their ministers lacked even the shadowy forebodings that agitated the masses. At first they regarded the Revolution as one of those periodic maladies to which the constitutions of all nations are liable, whose only effect is to afford new opportunities to the policy of their neighbors. If by chance they hit upon the truth about the Revolution, they did so unwittingly.
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- Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , pp. 11 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011